Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o leaves the field after the defeat in the BCS title game. / Matt Cashore, USA TODAY Sports

by Mike Lopresti, USA TODAY Sports

by Mike Lopresti, USA TODAY Sports

What do we know for sure anymore, except that we can touch and see and hear ourselves?

The Manti Te'o story was one we couldn't put down. It had everything we love in drama. Triumph from tragedy, cheers from tears. An inspiring winner with a smile on his face. Who did not want to share it, as we would any irresistible tale? And so everyone did, down to the kids who wore leis in the stands.

It was, in nearly every way, a legend, except for a championship at the end.

Turns out, a lot of it was a hoax. How much? We don't know. Who did it? We don't know. Why? We don't know. What part did Te'o play in it? We don't know.

Is this the road on which sport is supposed to take us? Is this the dead end where it is supposed to leave us?

This comes the same week we learned that not even Lance Armstrong could carry on with the Armstrong myth. It came the same month that several baseball players with immortal numbers did not get a whiff of the Hall of Fame.

The scoreboard or clock is never supposed to lie, but sometimes it does. That was the hard lesson of the drug era. This is different, in its bizarre nature and baffling time line. Compelling human drama fact that suddenly became fiction. But in the end, whoever's twisted pleasure created the myth, the bleak message is the same.

We were wrong to believe.

Notre Dame said it got the first word about the matter on Dec. 26. The Irish, you might recall, played a football game on Jan. 7. Te'o didn't have a very good performance; a shadow of a season that made him a Heisman name. Was Alabama responsible for that, or the burden of realizing his story was crashing down?

We don't know. That is the inevitable turn in this, as it is in so many stories, once they swerve into darkness. We start out enthralled, and then we're shocked, and then confused. And finally, disenchanted.

Now the Manti Te'o story just became unforgettable for a very different reason. And Te'o in the same sentence with the term "fantasy league'' is now a running online joke.

What if he had actually won the Heisman, largely through the national warmth of his tale? Think of that mess.

"I miss them,'' he said after one game about the genuine grandmother who really died, and the imagined girlfriend who didn't. "But I know I'll see them again one day.''

Words that moved people then, and haunt Te'o now. Words that frame a sorry question which seems out of place in a golden age of information.